Pricing Your College Choices

A new online tool launched by a federal regulator last week offers students – and check-writing parents – one of the most comprehensive databases on college financing, with price tags on more than 7,500 schools and special calculators that can estimate education benefits for service members.

The cost of higher education continues to climb faster than the rate of inflation, and debt related to college expenses in the U.S. has crossed the $1 trillion mark, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is unveiling the college data site.

The consumer agency aims to make it easier for families to estimate how much college is going to cost them – down to the monthly student-loan payments they’re going to have to start paying after graduation. Consumers can plug in the names of the colleges and universities they’re most interested in, press the “compare” button, and the tool will spit out the estimated cost and debt loads based on average grants and scholarships.

April is the peak time for receiving college-acceptance letters. So students who have already been accepted to college and have a sense of how much financial aid they’ll receive can get estimates of what their student-loan payments will look like.

The agency’s Financial Aid Comparison Shopper, which is in a beta version, uses data from the current 2011-12 academic year derived from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which is maintained by the National Center For Education Statistics, a federal agency.

The tool to help decipher tuition costs is a first for the federal government, which has been criticized by some in academic and policy circles for not doing enough to help students compare college costs and sort through confusing financial-aid forms. While some private and nonprofit groups offer ways to help consumers decipher college financing info, the consumer agency’s tool is unique in that it offers data on thousands of schools in one place.

Interested in attending George Washington University in Washington, one of the nation’s more expensive schools? Well, the sticker price is $57,148 for the first year, according to the database. On average, students here get about $30,000 in grants and scholarships, leaving the student’s total borrowing level at about $27,000, the agency’s tool says. If taking out student loans to finance that roughly $27,000 load, students can expect to pay about $1,638 per month over a decade. That, says the CFPB, would be a “high” debt burden.

In contrast, the University of Texas-Pan American, in Edinburg, was recently highlighted as one of the most-affordable colleges in the nation. It carries a $15,785 sticker price for the first year, based on the consumer bureau tool. If a student receives about $14,000 in scholarships and grants, that leaves him or her with less than $1,500 in borrowing costs. The monthly payment is $84 over 10 years, which wins a “low” debt burden rating from the consumer agency.